3 February 2011

To all you knockers out there - boobies, fun-bags!

| weeziepops
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On reading of the sacking of a federal public servant as a result of inappropriate use of departmental IT to view porn, I was intrigued that the search word of choice for one such incident was “knockers”.

I am not (no, really – I’m not) an on-line porn afficionado, but I reckon if I wanted to access some of the stuff I would go with something less Benny Hill-ish.

Also, I wonder if the initial reaction of the public servant in question was to lie and deny, “No, no – it wasn’t a search for THOSE sort of knockers. I’m getting a new front door, you see.”

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colourful sydney racing identity said :

Have you read the Federal Court decision? Please do so it may make your response appear a bit more well informed.

To be fair, there is no link to the court decision, so we are all making our off hand statements based solely on the other posts in this thread.

colourful sydney racing identity9:01 am 04 Feb 11

Rollersk8r said :

colourful sydney racing identity said :

Rollersk8r said :

Yes – read the story. Think it’s extremely sad that someone has lost their job and had their life ruined for looking at a few free and legal pictures. Yes – he was very foolish for using work equipment but in the guy’s defence he was using his own ISP and tried hard to remove all the evidence…

Read the decision. The main reason he lost his job was lying about the images rather than simply accessing them.

Well my understanding is he lost his job for breaching the APS Code of Conduct, specifically that he’d agreed at some point to not use work equipment for that purpose.

Have you read the Federal Court decision? Please do so it may make your response appear a bit more well informed.

DeadlySchnauzer said :

To put it another way, if I use my work car out of work hours in my own private time to drive to the newsagent and purchase a perfectly legal copy of some good wholesome pornography, would I really deserve to be fired?

Whether you deserve to be fired or not is for someone else to argue, however if you read the fine print, your personal trip in the Z car is a big no no, and you would no doubt find yourself facing a breach of the code of conduct for using it for personal reasons regardless of what you went to buy.

Wow! That’s certainly very harsh. Who cares if a sexually repressed public servant wants to use a tiny bit of government bandwith IN HIS OWN time to look at something healthy, normal and comforting like a set of nice boobs?

Bring back male domination in the workplace and these sort of sacking wouldn’t happen.

Thoroughly Smashed said :

If that screenshot of ********* gets out you’re stuffed.

How did you know my password was eight asterisks?

The thing is you can buy a netbook these days for $400, why use a work computer for anything but work?

If he breached the APS Code of Conduct, he could have been reprimanded, fined, or demoted. Dismissal is the last resort and in this case seems a bit harsh.

I bet there’s heaps of public servants with work laptops who are feeling pretty nervous at the moment, particularly if they work for Resources.

Gantz said :

Rollersk8r, so you are saying that because he tried to hide all evidence and his tracks, he should be excused?

No – I’m saying he should be excused because it’s not that big a deal, certainly not worth the public humiliation, the department’s money, the court’s time etc etc. Although maybe there’s more to the story…

Years ago in a previous APS workplace someone accidentally left a hardcore DVD in a work laptop and returned it. Is this not exactly the same thing? Obviously it took about 2 seconds to track down who borrowed the computer. Instead of naming and sacking the person they sent out a very strongly worded first-and-final warning type email to everyone.

We had a laugh and made a lot of guesses about who it was – but never did find out and that’s as far as it went.

colourful sydney racing identity said :

Rollersk8r said :

Yes – read the story. Think it’s extremely sad that someone has lost their job and had their life ruined for looking at a few free and legal pictures. Yes – he was very foolish for using work equipment but in the guy’s defence he was using his own ISP and tried hard to remove all the evidence…

Read the decision. The main reason he lost his job was lying about the images rather than simply accessing them.

Well my understanding is he lost his job for breaching the APS Code of Conduct, specifically that he’d agreed at some point to not use work equipment for that purpose.

colourful sydney racing identity3:15 pm 03 Feb 11

Rollersk8r said :

Yes – read the story. Think it’s extremely sad that someone has lost their job and had their life ruined for looking at a few free and legal pictures. Yes – he was very foolish for using work equipment but in the guy’s defence he was using his own ISP and tried hard to remove all the evidence…

Read the decision. The main reason he lost his job was lying about the images rather than simply accessing them.

Thoroughly Smashed2:39 pm 03 Feb 11

p1 said :

Deano said :

“a software program, called Spector360, was set up by the department to catch any inappropriate use. The program, which takes a snapshot of a user’s desktop every 30 seconds”

Even while I am typing the password into my internet banking?

If that screenshot of ********* gets out you’re stuffed.

Deano said :

“a software program, called Spector360, was set up by the department to catch any inappropriate use. The program, which takes a snapshot of a user’s desktop every 30 seconds”

Even while I am typing the password into my internet banking?

He obviously wasn’t senior enough …

Hey! Ed took t*ts out of the title of my post!

“a software program, called Spector360, was set up by the department to catch any inappropriate use. The program, which takes a snapshot of a user’s desktop every 30 seconds”

So a government department:

* doesn’t trust its employees
* spies on them continuously
* pays for someone to watch what their staff are doing (isn’ t that what supervisors do?)
* keeps a permanent record of everything typed and viewed on each staff member’s computer including sensitive, personal (as in HR), and classified information

I think the said department has bigger issues than some bloke looking at knockers in his own time.

I thought this testimonial from the Spector360 website was very telling:

“Spector 360 has become a vital business tool at HighTec HVAC because of its demonstrated ability to eliminate PC and Internet abuse, resulting in significant productivity savings.
Said President and Owner Edward DeAngelis: “Spector 360 is so important to me that if somehow the program was not working, I’d be freaking out.”

DeadlySchnauzer said :

To put it another way, if I use my work car out of work hours in my own private time to drive to the newsagent and purchase a perfectly legal copy of some good wholesome pornography, would I really deserve to be fired?

Yes. Why would you pay for pr0n when you can access it for free on you work laptop. Wait….

Jeez, you wouldn’t want to be an ornothologist doing a harmless search for Parus major.

Sweater kittens

Thoroughly Smashed11:39 am 03 Feb 11

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Hah.

I was reading the court report this morning… Couldn’t stop giggling when i learnt the word he was busted for was knockers !

And since it also mentioned his 25+ year career in the public service was ruined.. my guess is that he would likely be in his 50’s-60’s.

I know of someone in the ESA who was most surprised at some of the Google results he found using the search term “flooding”.

DeadlySchnauzer10:47 am 03 Feb 11

I think this ruling was completely over the top and un-warranted. It has its roots in the continual misinterpretation, by shall we say the older generation, of IT devices as the medium rather than the messenger.

To put it another way, if I use my work car out of work hours in my own private time to drive to the newsagent and purchase a perfectly legal copy of some good wholesome pornography, would I really deserve to be fired?

Rollersk8r, so you are saying that because he tried to hide all evidence and his tracks, he should be excused?

I use a typesetting package called LaTeX – searching for that on either Google or Amazon raises a few eyebrows.

Yes – read the story. Think it’s extremely sad that someone has lost their job and had their life ruined for looking at a few free and legal pictures. Yes – he was very foolish for using work equipment but in the guy’s defence he was using his own ISP and tried hard to remove all the evidence…

With a word like ‘knockers’ used to search porn, guaranteed the guy (assuming) would have been 60+.

Knockers? Really?

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